From the sublime to the ridiculous

Hah, that’s had you fumbling with your bi-focals, but no, there is no printing error. It is £375. The Gregynog Press, which in 1923 started its eventful history with a volume of poems by George Herbert, has now 80 years later published a selection chosen by his kinsman the Earl of Powis, with engravings by Sarah van Nierkerk. This appears on the eve of the UK Fine Press Book Fair in the Oxford Brookes University on 1 November and it would require a battalion of the British Army to prise its purple quarter leather and gold lettering from hands which have never held anything like this before. My hands.

And I have not done, for there is more. Beyond this edition there is another, of 15 copies in dark purple goatskin on dyed calf, with endbands of purple and grey silk. These are £2,000 each, and we are in a world of little locked shops in cathedral cities where the post is registered and few of us go.